Behind a low import price lies a heavy social bill: destroyed jobs, lost foreign exchange, and local supply chains sacrificed. A candid analysis.
The price printed on a bag of imported rice does not reflect its true cost. It reflects what the buyer pays at the moment of purchase — and nothing more. The difference, often considerable, is paid elsewhere: by a farmer abandoning his plot, by a government draining its foreign currency reserves, by an entire supply chain collapsing for lack of outlets.
This is not an abstraction. It has played out, in full scale, in Haiti at the end of the 1990s, in Senegal since the 1980s, and across much of West Africa to this day. It is time to put a figure on what is politely called 'competitiveness.'
Haiti: A Laboratory for a Foreseeable Collapse
The Haitian case remains one of the most thoroughly documented — and most painful — episodes in the recent history of food dependency. In the 1980s, Haiti produced roughly 80% of the rice it consumed. Its national variety, riz Creole, underpinned the rural economy of the Artibonite, the country's main agricultural region.
Under pressure from the Bretton Woods institutions, import tariffs on rice were slashed from 35% to 3% in the early 1990s — among the lowest rates in the world. Meanwhile, American rice arrived on Haitian markets with the indirect support of federal agricultural subsidies estimated by the USDA at several billion dollars per year for the US rice sector as a whole.
The outcome is well known: Haitian producers, unable to compete with artificially deflated prices, progressively abandoned their land. According to estimates cited by the NGO ActionAid, Haiti lost between 50,000 and 80,000 direct agricultural jobs in the rice sector during this period. A country that imported fewer than 7,000 tonnes of rice in 1985 was importing more than 350,000 tonnes per year by the mid-2000s.
Bill Clinton himself acknowledged during a US Senate hearing in 2010: "It took me a long time to realise that we were wrong." That statement — one of the rare public mea culpas by a Western leader on this subject — encapsulates the gulf between the theory of comparative advantage and the reality lived on the ground.
Senegal and European Wheat: A Manufactured Dependency
The mechanism differs, but the structural outcome is comparable in Senegal. The country now imports between 800,000 and 900,000 tonnes of wheat per year, primarily from France and Ukraine. This dependency was built over several decades, driven by the spread of wheat bread in urban diets — itself encouraged, from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, by food aid programmes that permanently reshaped consumer preferences.
Wheat does not grow in Senegal. But millet, sorghum, and fonio thrive there. These are local food crops, suited to local soils, mastered by local farmers, and often nutritionally superior to white bread. Yet they receive only very limited structural support in terms of mechanisation, processing, logistics, or commercial development.
The result: the wheat import bill drains several hundred million dollars of foreign exchange from the Senegalese economy every year. According to the African Development Bank, sub-Saharan African countries collectively spend more than $35 billion per year on food imports — a figure projected to exceed $110 billion by 2025 according to its own forecasts. These are resources that fund neither local irrigation, nor farmer training, nor processing supply chains.
'Competitiveness': A Concept Worth Dismantling
Behind the argument of low import prices lies a fundamental confusion between market price and total cost. An imported product may be cheaper to buy without being less costly to the society importing it.
Here are some cost items that the purchase price never captures:
- Destroyed agricultural jobs: in the rural economies of West Africa, each agricultural job supports an average of 4 to 6 people, according to ILO estimates.
- Exported foreign exchange: every dollar spent on food imports is a dollar that does not circulate in the local economy.
- Erosion of expertise: a supply chain abandoned for ten years cannot be rebuilt in one. Seeds, practices, and collection networks disappear.
- Vulnerability to external shocks: the 2022 wheat crisis, triggered by the war in Ukraine, served as a brutal reminder of how exposed net-importing countries are to geopolitical volatility.
- Hidden subsidies from the exporter: American rice, European wheat, and frozen Brazilian chicken reach African markets with production costs reduced by support mechanisms that African states simply cannot afford to replicate.
To speak of 'competitiveness' in this context is to compare structurally incomparable situations. It is measuring a doped sprinter and a runner who hasn't eaten by the same standard.
What a Frozen Imported Chicken Really Costs
The poultry example illustrates this mechanism clearly in West Africa. Since the early 2000s, frozen chicken carcasses — essentially cuts of low commercial value on European markets — have been exported in large volumes to Ghana, Benin, Cameroon, and Côte d'Ivoire, often at prices below local production costs.
A study by the IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture) published in the early 2010s estimated that poultry imports had contributed to reducing local producers' market share by 20 to 50% in several West African countries, depending on the market. Ghana responded by imposing import restrictions, with encouraging results for the revival of its domestic poultry sector.
This is not ideological protectionism. It is an agricultural policy decision that acknowledges what the market alone, in a context of massive distortions, cannot deliver: economic development.
Towards a New Definition of a 'Fair Price'
The question is not whether to ban food imports. In a world where droughts, health crises, and geopolitical tensions regularly disrupt supplies, diversifying sources remains a legitimate safeguard. International food trade has its own logic.
But there is an urgent need to change the yardstick by which we evaluate it. A 'fair price' for an import should incorporate:
- Its impact on local agricultural employment
- The net foreign exchange balance it generates or destroys
- The implicit or explicit subsidies in the exporting country
- The long-term food resilience of the importing country
These indicators exist. Organisations such as the FAO, CIRAD, and UNCTAD have been developing them for years. What is lacking is not the analytical tools. It is the political will — and sometimes the public pressure — to give them decision-making force.
The real question is not whether a country can afford to protect its local agriculture. It is whether it can afford not to.